The work and ideas of Alfred D.Chandler Jr. have enriched the field of Japanese business history and our understanding of that nation's industrial development. Chandler's studies about the rise of the large, professionally managed, multidivisional firm in the United States highlight factors critical not only to the United States' capitalist system but also to Japan's. Indeed, large firms played a dominant role in Japan's economic takeoff in the late 1800s. As these companies grew, they were transformed into professionally managed corporations. Managers, operating in a clear hierarchical chain of command, built up huge companies, such as Nihon Denki (NEC), Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi, Nippon Steel, Matsushita, and Toyota. In Japanese as in U.S. firms, the visible hand of management was critical to controlling the flow of work, from the input of raw materials to the production of finished goods.

From its beginning, accounting has been shaped by the needs of the business man and has in turn affected the handling of business problems. A clear illustration of this is the contrast between the system of accounts found in the ledgers of Florentine cloth manufacturers and the system of accounts found in the ledgers of Venetian merchants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cloth manufacturers such as the younger branch of the Medici arranged their entries under a Wage account, a Wool account, a Cloth Sales account, and so on, because their main concern was to keep track of these materials or obligations. The Venetians, being mainly exporters and importers, were concerned chiefly with keeping track of wares shipped, wares received, and amounts owed by or to agents. Accordingly, the distinctive, key accounts in Venetian books are (a) the accounts opened for each kind or lot of merchandise received, and (b) the accounts debited when wares were shipped. The latter are best called shipment, or venture, accounts. For example, when a Venetian merchant bought Florentine cloth to ship it to Constantinople, he opened a Florentine Cloth account in which he entered as debits all the costs of the cloth including the cost of packing it for shipment.

Henry E. Huntington, according to the following article, placed his imprint on the development of his region, the Los Angeles basin, to an extent unique among urban entrepreneurs. His great wealth and foresight, and especially his interests in street railways, real estate development, and hydroelectric power, enabled him to become a de facto city planner for one of the most important metropolitan regions in the United States.

The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest “new” economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics—a comment directed to “real” historians—which I am not—and especially to business historians, of whose product I have been an often satisfied—though occasionally restless—consumer. Needless to say, I find this to be an assignment difficult to fulfill. Praise will be put down to “trendy” insincerity and criticism to jealousy. Nor will Historians miss the irony in all the excitement generated by the award within a sub-tribe whose main charge has been to minimize the biographical, the “human” element in historical explanation. The self-styled “new” economic history movement, christened half-jokingly as early as 1968 by an ingenious neologism, “Cliometrics,” was now, twenty-five years later, awarded what is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel, in the persons of two of its very keen and most prolific, best-known, energetic, and indomitable practitioners, Douglass C. North of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) and Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.). Surely there is some lesson in marketing in all this to make business and entrepreneurial historians sit up and take notice.

This article traces the emergence of the General Motors Corporation as a multinational enterprise under the leadership of James D. Mooney from 1922 to the outbreak of World War II. Mooney's unpublished paper “The Science of Industrial Organization” (1929) portrays GM's multidivisional organization's use of the line-staff concept in organizing overseas assembly plants. Here I compare General Motors with Ford Motor Company, which had first-mover advantages overseas, and examine how each company organized and managed their international operations. “Linking pins,” a social-science concept, illustrates how GM's organizational hierarchy achieved vertical coordination of effort. Economic depression and the prelude to World War II followed the expansionary 1920s, requiring GM and Ford to adjust to a changing environment. The article also covers Mooney's naïve attempts to use business for diplomacy in the years leading up to the war.

This article delves into the origins of the first national multi-sector employers' associations in Denmark and the United Kingdom to understand why some countries produce highly-centralized, unitary national business associations, which develop labor market coordination with unions and the state. In contrast, other countries conclude their experiment with coordination by ultimately falling back on laissez-faire liberalism. In particular, I explore how the structure of party competition works to augment or to diminish coordination among employers. I argue that the interplay of party politics in the policy-making process influenced the incentives of opposing parties to block the legislation sought by employers, informed the incentives of the business-oriented right parties to delegate policy-making authority to private business and labor organizations, and shaped the capacities of employers to get what they wanted from the state.

This article studies the evolution of business in Mexico from the Revolution (1910–1920) to the early 1980s, a period when the state played a major role in the economy and undertook nationalistic policies. It explores the development of distinctive features that characterize business in Latin America: the importance of family-owned diversified business groups and immigrants, the prominence of illegal business, the central role of the entrepreneur, and the greater need to forge ties with government agents for company success. We argue that while some of these features had existed earlier, during this era they took the form that has prevailed until the present day.

We examine a classic “wheel of retailing” episode: the abandonment of the five-and-dime pricing formula by American variety chains. The variety chains switched from a conventional product lifecycle, focusing on cost reduction through standardization, to a reverse path up the “service cost–unit value” continuum. We show that, rather than reflecting deteriorating managerial acumen, this shift was a response to the continued imperative for growth following retail format saturation. Firm-specific (rather than format-specific) competitive advantages were too weak for any chain to be confident it could win a within-format price war, making interformat competition through raising price points more attractive.

This article analyzes the competitive strategies of Odense Steel Shipyard between 1918 and 2012 and challenges existing scholarship on competition in global industries. Until the 1980s, the yard adopted typical strategies in shipbuilding, starting with cost leadership and subsequently adopting global segmentation and differentiation strategies. From the mid-1980s, however, it successfully followed a unique national responsiveness strategy, which scholars including Dong Sung Cho and Michael E. Porter had ruled out in shipbuilding. The article shows how shipyard owners shaped strategies and influenced competitiveness.

Retracing closely the events of the life of George Frederic, king of the Miskitu (in present-day Honduras and Nicaragua) between 1816 and 1824, this article describes how this Miskitu actor sought to set up, by hiring British agents, the concrete realization of a Central American commercial and political independence project—understood here as a utopia. Although his project ended in failure, the actions of this little-known Miskitu king had repercussions in the Caribbean and beyond, even in the heart of the City of London. Concentrating on a marginal actor seldom considered by historians reveals how particular American Indigenous peoples sought to actively position themselves in the important commercial and political transformations affecting the Atlantic World in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Most of the academic work on the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) has focused on sociopolitical and military affairs; few scholars have considered the economic aspects of the period. Even though business historians know now that the Revolution did not bring generalized chaos or total destruction of manufacturing, we still need more research on economic issues. This article analyzes the evolution of the businesses of the Braniff family, as well as their involvement in politics once the regime of Porfirio Díaz collapsed. It examines the Braniffs' political ideas, their strategies to gain power, and their support of the political faction favorable to their interests. The article exposes the tactics the family used to guarantee the safety of their businesses, the losses they suffered, and the new ventures they made after the Revolution.